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Will H's avatar

This is great, and aligns with a lot of what I've been thinking about lately. You make this observation implicitly at the end, but the only thing I'd add to the piece is that this formlessness *very much is the point* for a lot of the creators and purveyors of this new "content." Form is, at its essence, a boundary line which delineates what a thing is from what it is not. This sort of limit is antithetical to the spirit of capital accumulation, which requires constant, never-ending growth, and so of course form is the first thing to go when culture becomes totally subordinate to finance.

I know that this argument is a bit obvious, a bit too much like a pretentious restatement of the "what were a bunch of hedge fund managers with the rights to Ghostbusters gonna do-- NOT make a reboot?" take, but I do think it's worth thinking about these problems in a more systemic way. Borrowing from McLuhan's now-cliche thesis that "the medium is the message," what sorts of thoughts, values, and aesthetics does a culture imbibe when so much of its dominant media is unashamedly formless *by design?*

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Oblomovism's avatar

Sorry, a long comment. I think you make some persuasive points, here, but I am also struck by the extent to which the internet creates the feeling of formlessness on a macro level, while being pretty rigidly beholden to form in its particulars.

Streaming platforms are the way they are because streaming has become its own form, one that encourages people to interact with storytelling in a particular way—by bingeing it, but with the endless possibility of repetition. That's what makes it different from the pre-DVD shows that weren't create with the expectation of repetition, and the prestige dramas fans could re-watch obsessively if they shelled out for the box set. Social media seems very similar: posts are ephemeral, but they can easily be preserved for posterity if they are sufficiently insightful or outrageous.

In the case of both streaming and social media, the formal pressures all but guarantee endless mimicry, because real originality is time-consuming, the payoff is relatively small, and the risk of missing the mark and producing a billion dollar flop or becoming the character of the day can have pretty serious negative consequences. I'm convinced this is why so much of twitter/instagram just seems to be the same kind of thing repeated endlessly (the arguments, the poses, the outrage, the meme format of the day). As much as streaming and posting promise a limitless horizon of possibility—you can do anything you want! Infinite types of content are theoretically available!—we end up with a fairly narrow range of options because only certain types of content work well within the form.

I think this is what Viktor Shklovsky, good materialist that he was, understood about the form/content question, even if he went a little too far in disregarding content sometimes: the artistic form you are using determines the kinds of things you can say, so if you want to be revolutionary in content, you have to be revolutionary in form first.

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